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The Great Media Game

It’s not the first time I can recall that Google has run an ad on the blank front page of Google.com but it’s certainly the first I can recall in a long time. The ad is (naturally) pushing their new 7″ tablet the Nexus 7. The new device has great reviews and at $199 it’s aimed squarely at the Kindle. Aside from the overall weirdness of having a huge ad on the front page the Nexus is an interesting departure for Google and another facet of what I believe is a much bigger media game.

For years we poor media consumers have had to put up with roughly 20 minutes in the hour of commercials…often poorly produced and repetitious. As a rough number I have seen the case made that for every hour of TV you watch advertisers are paying about 30 cents for access to your time. Then Satellite radio emerged with ad free music but horrible ads on their speech channels. Then came Pandora and a range of competitors offering essentially ad free or nearly ad free listening. Now we have Hulu, Hulu plus, Amazon Prime, iTunes and a range of video on demand offered by cable companies. The ad free content offered in many cases tends to be a little less current than prime time but if you don’t mind seeing earlier episodes or last quarter’s movies you can get a ton of pretty good content for about $20 a month, pretty much entirely ad free. Interestingly you can get almost everything you might want to watch except tonight’s new episodes live entirely without your cable provider. My youngest son recently took occupancy of his new off campus apartment and he’s proud to live a cable TV free lifestyle, no doubt he is an early adopter but it’s an option which wasn’t even available until quite recently.

So if you can live without tonight’s episode of Dancing With The Stars you can trade commercials for $20 and also get access to lots of content which wouldn’t be normally available. Catalyzing this dramatic shift in behavior are several key drivers including immersive high speed internet/wifi, mobile devices like the iPad or Nexus 7 and technology which seamlessly transfers content to the large flat screen which is a feature of pretty much every household in the US. It took about seven years for the flat screen to go from expensive luxury to commonplace. It’s taken less than two years for the tablet to make the same transition. The explosion of content sources (HuLu, iTunes etc) and the wireless integration technologies (Apple TV, Roku, Slingbox, Boxee etc) have all happened in just the last nine months. The adoption curves are shortening in real time.

We aren’t (yet) at the point where we can access all the content we want commercial free on any device in the house or outside for a total cost of about $100 per month…but I believe that’s visible from here.

About Tim Judd

Hello, My name is Tim Judd. In short I’m a serial entrepreneur with a focus on search, and President and CEO of Search Initiatives and eLocal Listing. You can follow me on Google+, Twitter, and of course... thinkjudd.com.